Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban: Mobile Media, Intimacy, and Augmented Whiteness Danielle Wong
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Document generated on 10/02/2021 11:01 p.m. Theatre Research in Canada Recherches théâtrales au Canada Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban: Mobile Media, Intimacy, and Augmented Whiteness Danielle Wong Volume 41, Number 1, 2020 Article abstract This article examines how everyday mobile media produce discursive and URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1071758ar affective modes of closeness that circulate as part of the Canada-US DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.41.1.108 border-making process under the Muslim ban. I contend that although the #WelcomeToCanada hashtag, which was made popular by Justin Trudeau’s See table of contents tweets in response to the US travel ban, presents an inclusive, multicultural Canada that appears to contrast the white supremacist, xenophobic narrative of Donald Trump’s executive order, its performance of flexible Canadian Publisher(s) borders actually renders ubiquitous, and therefore augments, the default whiteness of the heteropatriarchal national body imagined by liberal Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, University of Toronto narratives of inclusion. I compare #WelcomeToCanada to Sikh Canadian comedian Jus Reign’s Snapchat story about the Quebec City mosque attack and ISSN suggest that his overly faced selfies reveal the violence of a colourblind state gaze that functions like so-called neutral algorithmic vision. Jus Reign’s 1196-1198 (print) excessive closeness to his smartphone performs an ambivalent rupture of the 1913-9101 (digital) universalizing vision on which neoliberal multiculturalism is based, emphasizing the racist logics of facial detection technology even as he Explore this journal characterizes Islamophobia as a particularly US discourse. Cite this article Wong, D. (2020). Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban: Mobile Media, Intimacy, and Augmented Whiteness. Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada, 41(1), 108–125. https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.41.1.108 All Rights Reserved © University of Toronto, 2020 This document is protected by copyright law. Use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ This article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the Université de Montréal, Université Laval, and the Université du Québec à Montréal. Its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ ARTICLES Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban: Mobile Media, Intimacy, and Augmented Whiteness DANIELLE WONG1 This article examines how everyday mobile media produce discursive and affective modes of closeness that circulate as part of the Canada-US border-making process under the Muslim ban. I contend that although the #WelcomeToCanada hashtag, which was made popular by Justin Trudeau’s tweets in response to the US travel ban, presents an inclusive, multicultural Canada that appears to contrast the white supremacist, xenophobic narrative of Donald Trump’s executive order, its performance of flexible Canadian borders actually renders ubiquitous, and therefore aug- ments, the default whiteness of the heteropatriarchal national body imagined by liberal narratives of inclusion. I compare #WelcomeToCanada to Sikh Canadian comedian Jus Reign’s Snapchat story about the Quebec City mosque attack and suggest that his overly faced selfies reveal the violence of a colourblind state gaze that functions like so-called neutral algorithmic vision. Jus Reign’s excessive closeness to his smartphone performs an ambivalent rupture of the universal- izing vision on which neoliberal multiculturalism is based, emphasizing the racist logics of facial detection technology even as he characterizes Islamophobia as a particularly US discourse. Dans cet article, Danielle Wong se penche sur la façon dont les médias mobiles produisent au quotidien des modes de proximité discursive et affective dans le contexte du processus d’étab- lissement de la frontière canado-américaine sous l’interdiction musulmane. Selon Wong, il est vrai que #WelcomeToCanada, un mot-clic popularisé par une série de gazouillis publiés par Justin Trudeau suite à une interdiction de voyager aux États-Unis, présente l’image d’un Canada inclusif et multiculturel qui semble contraster d’avec le récit suprématiste et xénophobe sous-tendant le décret de Donald Trump. Cependant, la façon de représenter la souplesse des frontières can- adiennes dans ce mot-clic rend en fait omniprésent, et donc augmente, le caractère blanc de l’organisme national hétéropatriarcal imaginé par les récits libéraux d’inclusion. Wong compare #WelcomeToCanada et l’histoire partagée sur Snapchat par l’humoriste canadien sikh Jus Reign au sujet de l’attentat contre la mosquée de Québec. Elle laisse ainsi entendre que les égoportraits au cadrage serré montrent la violence du regard d’un état qui se dit insensible à la couleur de la peau tout en ayant l’effet d’un algorithme soi-disant neutre. La proximité excessive de Jus Reign à la lentille de son téléphone intelligent opère une rupture ambivalente de la vision universalisante sur laquelle repose le multiculturalisme néolibéral et met en évidence les logiques racistes de la détec- tion faciale alors même que Jus Reign dit de l’islamophobie qu’il s’agit d’un discours américain. S 108 Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban • PP 108-125 • 2020 / 41.1 • TRIC / RTAC tric_41.1_body_5.indd 108 2020-07-06 8:41 AM DANIELLE WONG When Fadwa Alaoui attempted to enter the USA at the Quebec-Vermont border in January 2017 with two of her children and her cousin, US border officials ordered her to turn over her smartphone and passcode. The agents questioned the Moroccan Canadian woman and her cousin separately, interrogating them about their Muslim faith, the mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque the month before, their views on President Donald Trump, and the videos of Muslim prayers on Alaoui’s phone. After being held at the border for four hours, Alaoui and her family were denied entry into the US, as the border agents cited “videos on [their] phones that are against [the US]” (Rukavina). The Quebec resident was one of many Muslim travellers detained or turned away under Trump’s 2017 directive to temporarily ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries. Executive Order 13769, titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” came into effect on January 27, 2017, and indefinitely suspended the entry of Syrian refugees, prohibited all other refugees from entering the country for 120 days, and banned the entry of foreign nationals from Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya. The executive order, which is more commonly referred to as the Muslim ban or travel ban, was revised in March 2017 to remove Iraq from the banned list, and then again in September of that year, removing Sudan and adding Chad, Venezuela, and North Korea.2 Despite several legal challenges of various versions of the travel ban at lower courts, the US Supreme Court upheld the executive order on June 26, 2018. A day after the White House announced the Muslim ban, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada” (@JustinTrudeau). In an indirect but clear response to the Trump administration’s travel ban (one Politico writer described Trudeau’s post as a “subtweet”), the prime minister followed up this tweet with a touching photo of him kneeling or crouching to greet a Syrian child at a Toronto airport. The photo was taken during Trudeau’s 2015 meet-and-greet with some of the first Syrian refugees to arrive in Canada after the federal government announced an initiative to accept 25,000 Syrian refugees by February 2016. During the event, Trudeau handed out winter coats to arriving Syrians and assured them, “You’re safe at home now” (Austen). In the tweeted image, Trudeau and the Syrian girl hold each other’s gaze while they are surrounded by others who look on with seeming approval. The photo was posted with the caption: “#WelcomeToCanada.” In this article, I consider how feelings and performances of intimacy produced under or as responses to the Muslim ban on mobile media platforms function as part of a North American surveillant assemblage (Ericson and Haggerty). By this, I mean the processes of contemporary state and corporate surveillance that operate beyond “raw” forms of monitor- ing to encompass, through digitization, integrated, seemingly passive, and more ubiquitous modes of bordering. More specifically, I analyze how mobile media like Twitter and Snapchat produce discursive and affective modes of closeness between self and Other on multiple levels—between algorithmic lenses and the racialized body, the nation-state and the individ- ual, and the material and virtual self—that circulate as part of the Canada-US border-making process. I contend that although the #WelcomeToCanada hashtag presents an inclusive, multicultural Canada that appears to contrast the white supremacist, xenophobic narrative of the US Muslim ban, its discursive and embodied positioning of Canada as a caring and moral community elides the nation’s ongoing settler colonial and racist histories. As a pos- ture of multicultural care, #WelcomeToCanada performs an expansion of Canadian borders3 TRIC / RTAC • 41.1 / 2020 • PP 108-125 • Close Encounters Under the Muslim Ban 109 tric_41.1_body_5.indd 109 2020-07-06 8:41 AM DANIELLE WONG that actually renders ubiquitous, and therefore augments, the default whiteness of the hetero- patriarchal national body imagined by liberal narratives of inclusion. Here I deploy Btihaj Ajana’s concept of “augmented borders” to consider social media’s role in enacting a discourse of flexible Canadian borders that operates in conjunction with the extended reach of state surveillance under the travel ban. Whereas “flexibility” and “expansion” in this context often indicate relaxed border control, Ajana’s concept of augmentation articulates how borders are further intensified by their diffuseness and invisibility.